


Second Chance

by LillithBlack



Series: Causal Loops and Other Quantum Nonsense 'verse [2]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Freeform, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-09
Updated: 2017-09-12
Packaged: 2018-12-25 12:14:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12035676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LillithBlack/pseuds/LillithBlack
Summary: In his relationship with the intricacies of the universe, she was a constant and he wanted no variable to ever move them from this point.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> My first SGA fic. A little character study that doesn't really fit into a longer fic that I'm writing but that wouldn't leave my head so I'd thought I post it anyway.
> 
> I always loved Rodney's interactions with Elizabeth.
> 
> Part 0.8 of the Causal Loops and other Quantum Nonsense Verse. 
> 
> No idea when I'll be posting more but there you go.
> 
> McShep in the second chapter :P

The thing about Elizabeth Weir, was that she was almost everyone's second, and sometimes even, third chance.

 

Certainly she was Rodney’s.

 

If not for her he might still be freezing his ass off in the bowels of a Siberian sub-basement. She had wanted him, even before she had met him. In fact everyone she chose for that first trip had been playing second fiddle, or ostracised due to some past misdemeanour. Maybe it was strategy or maybe she knew the depth of determination these people would be capable of, to eek out survival in a far flung Galaxy with no extraction plan. Or maybe she simply knew the kind of greatness she could achieve relying on those who had been so close to it and lost.

 

Nothing creates winners, quite like losing.

 

Major John Sheppard was clearly a dead ringer for the profile she was creating for the expedition. Rodney knew this, having hacked into his file the second he was away from the chair and Carson fawning over Sheppard's ATA gene. He scowled at the black marks and demotions. Eerily similar to every other file he had perused.

 

There was a certain kinship in knowing they were all a bunch of rejects in one way or another, whether it be running from their own government or just not ready to conform to a family's expectation of marriage or even just an orphan boy ready to prove himself in new worlds.

 

No matter the reasons, everyone always felt that gratitude to Dr.Weir deeply. Even Rodney humbled by the opportunity but never willing to show it felt it. He didn't dare make a single untoward advance in the first few weeks of their acquaintance, in the chill of the Antarctic dome, despite the very obvious attraction he felt towards her.

 

And then later, they were friends. Such good friends that he didn't understand how he could love a woman so much, that he would stand infront of a gun for her, yet couldn't bring himself to casually ask her to dinner alone.  

 

Yes, there had been far too much happening later, _like certain impending doom_ but he never got over the surprise of his own unthinking actions that day. He never found himself capable of acting on any of the very deep feelings he had for her, he respected her far too much.

 

Mostly.

 

An errant thought on the too long, lonely lantean nights, he could disremember.

  
  
He loved her too, in every way that was important.

 

He loved her like every expedition member loved her, for their new beginnings, he loved her for the trust she placed in him day in, day out. He loved her for the strength of her resolve with every calamity that came and for her steady unrelenting acceptance of Sheppard's “leave no man behind" mantra.

 

He loved her for her open mind, like an overflowing swimming pool ready to accept and keep you afloat. He loved her because she told him no.

 

He loved her like a friend and like a teacher. He loved her like a mother and like a sister. He loved her like a king loves a queen on a chessboard. He loved her like a courtier in reverence to a sovereign. He loved her like a man loves a woman and a human loves another human.

 

It never disturbed him, the profoundness with which he understood his feelings for Elizabeth Weir. He never felt even the slightest inclination to tell her or change their relationship so wholly at peace with their status.

 

In his relationship with the intricacies of the universe, she was a constant and he wanted no variable to ever move them from this point.

 

He was with Katie when a change did come, or at least a change in his perception of the situation.

 

Granted he was half dead and partially ascended when he heard it.

 

“We love you Rodney.”

 

And later when he smiled and insisted, she had told she loved him, he didn't say “And I love you back.”

 

She protested good naturedly but didn't deny him, joining him in the eager school boy grin stretched across his face.

 

(He decidedly didn't think about what she could have read in the book he wrote, he couldn't remember any of it. But she obviously did.)

 

And so for the first time, his cognisance of how his world turned changed to include the facts that he loved Elizabeth Weir in every conceivable way and she loved him Meredith Rodney McKay and it wasn't important how, only that she did.

 

A few weeks later Elizabeth Weir was broken into pieces, and dead, and dying. Rodney’s heart stuttered and his fingers shook over the keyboard.

 

What pique of madness had convinced him he was okay with never telling her how he felt, that he was at peace with it?

 

But the madness of the city failing it's journey through space continued and after the nanites and after the cold vacuum of space and after and after and after, she told him to run and he ran.

 

Hadn't he given her that second chance he thought in the jumper ride back, John’s stony silence the only backdrop to his harsh breathing.

 

With Elizabeth there had always, always been hope for that second, that last one, that next chance. Wasn't this not knowing a new chance for her? Better than being dead and buried in the cold ground? He didn't let himself think of the empty casket they would never bring through the wormhole to a planet where she no longer belonged. Deliberately running his mind through Carson’s funeral everytime instead.

 

And if in the next two years he was a little softer, a little easier to forgive. Overlooking some mistakes, so slowly and incrementally no one noticed all the second and third chances he began to give out.

 

It felt like the least he could do to keep a part of her alive.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rodney compares the two friends he has left in his life after Carson's death.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set in some nebulous time after Carson's death but before Elizabeth's.

The thing was, that John and Elizabeth were far too alike. Sure looking at the surface you couldn't really say that, but knowing them as Rodney knew them it wasn't difficult to see.

 

After Carson died Rodney saw it even more.

 

John would ply him with alcohol and Elizabeth would ply him with work, in the days after he returned from Earth. From informing Mrs. Beckett about her son’s passing.

 

They both tried to continuously watch for him, comfort him in any which way they could. John let him steal every piece of bacon from his plate at breakfast. Elizabeth didn’t force him to take the next requisite rest day.

 

They handled him with kid gloves like he was fragile, and it's not like he wasn't. The smallest thing set him off and he’d developed the most intricate of short cuts to avoid catching even a glimpse of the infirmary.

 

They didn't smother him but he could sense the eyes they kept on him and he felt a small glow of hope in his chest at that. He knew they hadn't exactly mourned, too wrapped up in watching Rodney for breakage.

 

So it was that he decided to break.

 

On damp evening in Elizabeth's arms, when she came to ask if he’d had a chance to look at a medical device they'd found. He had planned to examine it with Carson and now there was no Carson. Rodney didn't know when his hands had started to shake and when he'd dropped the crystals he'd been working on or when Elizabeth was suddenly wrapped around him clutching his head to her shoulder. But she'd crossed the few steps between them and thank all the powers that be, that no one else had been in the lab because Rodney cried like a baby and Elizabeth just held him and held him and held him.

 

As if Rodney breaking down was the catalyst, he could feel the hitch of her breath as she stroked his hair back and said nothing.

 

And if the side of his head was damp with what could have been her tears, no one had to know because when they parted and Elizabeth wiped his face with her hands, her eyes were bright and clear.

 

John just beat the crap out of him during a hand to hand lesson. Usually he let Ronon take that charge but today he hauled a protesting and highly agitated Rodney into the makeshift dojo. Rodney had been crankier than usual, ranting non-stop and simply mean to his minions, which usually was par for the course but this time even John couldn’t handle Miko running out of the labs crying her eyes out.

 

He threw some of Teyla's banto sticks at Rodney then came at him with a vicious strike, it was fight or be pummeled by branch for Rodney, who was so incensed he just fought back. After a while it all devolved into John knocking him down and Rodney getting up to take another running stab at John.

 

By the time he was blinking sweat out of his eyes and mindlessly trying to hurt John as much as possible, Rodney realised he didn't feel that clamp of hot disgusting anger in his stomach any more.

 

“You good now?” John asked panting and Rodney nodded staring off somewhere behind his head.

 

“Okay. Hit the showers, we still have that mission scheduled for tomorrow,” John said casually, yanking the sticks out of Rodney's hands and stalking off.

 

Rodney didn't mention how he could literally feel John walking easier after the whole debacle. After that Rodney was the only one still avoiding the infirmary.

 

The way they both tried to protect him was ridiculous and self sacrificing and just just plain stupid. So if Rodney played it up a little, lingered a little longer in Elizabeth's office or challenged John to game of chess or a racing competition a little more often, he could pretend it was all for his own sake.

And had nothing to do with how much easier their smiles came after.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi on[Tumblr.](http://buckywithegoodhair.tumblr.com/) I love to chat.


End file.
